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kkleiner writes "A startup called Matternet is building a network of quadcopter drones to deliver vital goods to remote areas and emergency supplies to disaster-stricken areas. The installation of solar-powered fueling station and an operating system to allow for communications with local aviation authorities will allow the network to be available around the clock and in the farthest reaches of the world. 'Matternet’s drone network has three key components. First, the drones—custom-built autonomous electric quadcopters with GPS and sensors, capable of carrying a few kilos up to 10 kilometers (and more as the tech advances). Next, the firm will set up a network of solar-powered charging stations where drones autonomously drop off dead batteries and pick up charged ones. A drone battery that can travel 10 km need not limit the drone itself to 10 km — rather, these drones can theoretically travel the whole network by swapping out batteries. The final component will be an operating system to orchestrate the drone web, share information with aviation authorities, and fly missions 24/7/365.'"

You have a dim view of humanity my anonymous friend. Justified, perhaps, but dim.

What I want to know if why the %$#@! are they using electric drones if the idea is to service remote areas? 10km? Give me a couple days to warm up and I could carry 100lbs/day of supplys that far on foot without hardly trying. Electric is nice and all but it's still what, an order of magnitude or so lower in energy density than hydrocarbons? When you choose ideaology or engineeering convenience over actual real-world use-case scenarios don't be surprised when your brilliant new product is still-born.

Response time. You have to follow terrain, the drone does it in a straight line and at higher speed.

The electric I imagine is so the charging stations can operate for years without refueling or repair. A useful feature, as they are all advertising expensive parts ready for the looting, so would probably have to be placed in concealed, inaccessible locations in the middle of nowhere. Of course, they could just use a much larger drone with an engine and not need the stations at all... it'd seem easier to just automate the long-established airdrop technology. Plane flies out, drops crates of supplies on parachute, plane flies back.

A better option would be to combine these with something like Aeroscraft cargo blimp to haul 60 tons od stuff in hours (20 -30) to disaster area and then do the delivery by drones.

The stuff could be preassembled kits of food rations, water purification, wide-spectrum antibiotics, perhaps a heater packaged in a light sheltering material with simple, drawn, cuilturally independent instructions in every item.

Odd you should say that the largest lighter-than-air craft could carry only 10 tons.

A simple google search reveals that the Hindenburg [wikipedia.org] apparently had a lift capacity of 10,000kg, which is indeed 10 (metric) tons, or approximately 10 "long tons". Something closer to 11 "short tons", though.

I was thinking the CycloCrane [wikipedia.org] would have a larger lift, but apparently that was limited to 2 tons (theory; 1 ton in practice, it turned out).

So you're planning on putting lots of these expensive, hardened systems anywhere there 'might' be a disaster? Makes absolutely no sense.

If a disaster is that likely in a given locale, it would make much more sense to build your bunker - and fill it with thousands of pounds of supplies instead of letting your tiny toy copter bring you a couple of cans of beer and some joints. Or do what the Air Force does, put the stuff in pallets, attach a parachute and airlift it to where it's needed.

All true if it's just a disaster network - but even when no disaster is present, there could be uses. Perhaps enough to cover running costs. Much of the world is still very rural, with villages or even individual residences kilometers apart and joined only by narrow dirt tracks. Drones could be cheaper than couriers for light-weight deliveries. Drugs, books, consumer goods in general, replacement parts for damaged infrastructure. Think less crates of food, and more the type of things you might buy on Amazon

Using drones for delivery is not a new idea at all, problem is no one has the money to spend on something that will not make a profit. Other drone delivery systems are at least using them to deliver beer or newspapers or other things, and if a disaster struck I suppose they could be used to deliver water instead of beer
https://www.google.com/search?q=drone+delivery [google.com]

Turbines do not scale well, and if you're trying to put 4-6 of them at a few horsepower each on a quadrotor, you're going to get absolutely shit for efficiency. If you try to couple all the rotors into a single turbine at a few tens of horsepower, you're still going to get shit for efficiency, and now it's not going to be controllable. Forget all that, it doesn't make sense to use quadrotors in the first place. Disc loading really does matter when you're lugging shit around, and those small rotor discs m

Electric drones will require very minimal maintenance. Electric motors and batteries don't really need servicing, they don't require all the same fluids, they can last longer, they are less complex, and they can refuel in remote locations for free.

A gas/diesel motor would need very frequent and regular servicing and a large maintenance team.

My suggestion sounds like a good approach. A good old-fashioned truck to haul the supplies most of the way, to the edge of the rubble/rabble/flood/ash, then use drones to distribute the supplies from there. The drones don't need really long range then, and their low capacity isn't such an issue when they can make a trip in half an hour.

What I want to know if why the %$#@! are they using electric drones if the idea is to service remote areas? 10km? Give me a couple days to warm up and I could carry 100lbs/day of supplys that far on foot without hardly trying.

Drones don't need "a couple of days to warm up," and besides, what're you gonna do if there's a mountain or a canyon, a landfall, a sinkhole, collapsed buildings or anything similar in the way? That wouldn't be a problem at all for flying drones, but you could spend days trekking another path. In the time spent for you to "warming up" and finding another path to the destination the drones would've already sent several times the amount of stuff that you can carry.

The *drones* will be used as target practice. Not only good practice, but you get to play the mail-theft lottery. Shoot down a drone, maybe it's got a valuable cargo of expensive drugs. Or at least some food.

We've reached the singularity now haven't we? I mean it's very singular how that company and that shill website happen to publish this sort of article at the same time when the kind of disaster they're talking about is in the news. It's times like these you're reminded that singularity hub isn't just faffing for the dimwitted, it's has a soul, too. A soul of darkness, granted, but a soul nonetheless.

I agree. If they were serious about providing disaster relief, rather than wanting to play with cool toys, they'd use full-size helicopter drones capable of delivering hundreds of kilograms and travel the whole distance without needing to refuel. That would be a genuinely useful service.

How well are their little solar-charging quadrocopters going to fare in stormy weather?

Actually, gasoline engines scale down pretty well nowadays. You lose a bit of efficiency, but if you want to have range, they are still your best bet. A small gasoline RC plane could cross the Atlantic [wikipedia.org] for instance. You can't yet do that with an electrical one (unless you use solar panels of course).

The reasons on why you don't see them in quadcopters are twofolds : First, they indeed are heavier and more complicated. Putting 4 of these in place is harder to do and you need to feed them gasoline, to have

That doesn't mean quadrotors are in any way good for a commercial product. Quadrotors mean you don't need the complex gearboxes and swashplates of a traditional helicopter. You just get four cheap propellers and cheap electric motors, a speed controller, and strap them onto a bunch of sticks. The barrier for entry is very low, meaning hobbyists can get into it with little skill or ability. If you actually have trained engineers to design it, and trained machinists to built the intricate workings of a tr

Why would stability be any more difficult than a traditional helicopter? It's not like the center of gravity needs to be perfectly aligned with the center of the rotors. We have this thing called a swashplate. The rotor blades are hinged, and the free end rides on the swashplate. Move the plate up, your angle of attack decreases, and you have less thrust. Move it down, and you have more thrust. Pitch it, and you generate uneven thrust across the rotor disc. You can use this to shift that center of th

Hinged blades? swashplates? tilting rotors? That's a lot of mechanical systems to maintain. An electric quadcopter is simply four electric motors with propellers attached to their shafts. Nothing tilts or pivots or hinges. No moving parts apart from the propellers.

Those quadcopter things are fairly reliable. There's even designs out there for 6 or 8 redundant rotors. These things can survive a fairly hard landing especially if the rotors are shrouded, whereas a helicopter is a lot more damage-prone. A running helicopter that falls on its side will most likely need some serious repair work before it'll fly again. A damaged quadcopter can be fixed with duct tape in most cases.

No you won't. Lift must be balanced. If you lose one motor, you also lose its opposite. If you're using these things to haul cargo, which means you're not running it anywhere near a 2:1 thrust to weight ratio, and you're going to crash. You're right back to the single point of failure you were with the swashplate.

....you don't need autonomous charging stations for city-wide surveillance. You can just fly the drone back home.

Don't forget about quick deployment either.

A well placed charging station with a drone already inside ready to deploy at any time could shave off a number of minutes for getting first eyes on the scene. And sometimes, that very short initial lead time could be crucial in locating a drowning victim, or identifying a fleeing bank robber, or seeing what's going on just a few milliseconds after some gunshots are heard.

Ah, but you could deploy a squadron of these drones and cover a huge search grid, thus finding the victim sooner, allowing the Search and Rescue folks to concentrate more on the rescue portion than the search portion.

The joke is that it should actually be a recovery of a drowning victim, not a rescue. If you still have a chance of rescuing them, they haven't yet drowned.

Yes, I got the joke. However, there is a difference between drowning and drowned. Drowning means having your respiration impaired by liquids. It does not mean death. Many drowning victims have been plucked from the water, had their lungs drained and are alive today.

It won't help rescue the drowning victim because the actual people who could rescue aren't going to be any closer to the victim than currently and a 20 minute response time will REMAIN a 20 minute response time for that reason.

Sure, I used the wrong word. I should have said "soon-to-drown" victim, not "drowning" victim. Also in theory, the quadrocopter itself could carry a rescue buoy [discovery.com] and/or it could also be paired up with a water rescue bot like Emily [economist.com].

This presumes

a) that the drone is taken out there (if it's on a charging station), but if they knew that then they could also send humans out there at that time instead

A bot could be sitting in a launching station ready to deploy at a moment's notice 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year. I don't think you could say the same thing for a human being. In any case, I'm not saying that a bot would be ideal for all use cases. That's certainly n

It fascinates me that they think they could make a profit with something like this.

They don't make money off of what they're producing, they make money from the VCs. I think most of you know this already.1. Come up with something that seems new and unique but is totally useless (a few kilograms over 10km, really?).2. Get VC funding.3. Pay yourself a salary (Profit!) while you do "research and development" for a few years until the VC funding runs out and they realize your idea isn't going to work in the real world.4. Go to step 1.

The VCs are free to be as stupid as they want to be with their own money, but with titles like "Head of Regulatory Strategy" you know that they will be going after government money too which means that us taxpayers may still be footing the bill for this bullshit. That's what really chaps my hide.

My impression was that copters are difficult to fly in high winds/storm conditions. Is this true? will this also be true of these copters? If so, the claim that they can fly 24/7/365 is perhaps not credible?

I don't believe the tornadoes took the roads away. Anyone can drive a semi truck to OK with loads of supplies. What is a quadcoptor doing that a truck can't?

Same thing for Sandy. NY/NJ were not inaccessable. Small parts were for short periods. Still, those areas were so dense you'd need thousands of coptors to supply those people with supplies. A truck would still be a better faster option.

will allow the network to be available around the clock and in the farthest reaches of the world.

Well, the patent for donkeys expired for some time: no way to get some money for building a network of donkeys in the far reaches of the world. Besides, I don't see how one may outsource the construction of donkeys to China.

Forget, for a minute that drones have started off with a bad reputation, thanks to things like anonymous delivery of lethal capabilities and peering at people's backyard pot farms.

There are a LOT of intriguing applications for small quadcopters in a disaster situation. Since they are smaller, lighter, and slower that the bomb-type drones they can go places faster and easier than land-based alternatives and they can travel closer to the surface without the limitations of actually having to navigate the surf

That is 1 unit in, 1 (or a bit less) unit out with 2 units are deposited to allow the next drone to hop to/from the next station. So for N hops, one will consume in 2^N units of fuel per drone simply for the last trip of 2*N (ie. return).

Now if they create deposits by sneaker-netting them to the depot, the problem will be solved.

You forget the power of magic Matternet will be using: the indestructible (unaffected by disasters) network of solar-powered charging stations that can be used even nighttime (as in 24/7/365) and in the farthest reaches of the world.

What? Not magic but smoke-and-mirrors? Well, sonny, nothing that's not solvable by the correct amount of "lobby".

What is needed for quadrotors is to stop using god damned quadrotors. If you want longer duration flight, you need to get that disc loading down, which means one big rotor instead of a bunch of small ones.

The quadrotors are simpler. I'll give you that. There is no swashplate, nor servos to control the swashplate, of course no rudder control simply means you can no longer control yaw.

More stable? More agile? Both of those statements are completely false. The use of a swashplate means your lift is continuously variable from one side of the disc to the other. It's trivial to shift your center of lift directly over top your center of gravity, and produce stable flight. Further, a traditional helicopter only

For package delivery you would likely be flying in urban areas that have restrictions on unmanned aircraft, autonomous or not. I believe in the US you need at least one operator/spotter with line-of-sight (with their own eyes, not a camera) to the aircraft - not easy in urban areas unless you are in a helicopter yourself.

Nevertheless, I am sure this will happen in a few years, but it will be messy.

Sadly, this is yet another example of a cool concept that isn't going to get very far (no pun intended) due to the lack of the über power supply. At best, multirotor helicopters with any sort of payload have an endurance of about 15 minutes. Until that number gets well above the 60 minute threshold, this is all drawing-board stuff. And I'm talking about 60 minutes of on-mission performance which doesn't include getting to and from base camp. You're really going to need some sort of ultra-capacitor

One thing I've been thinking about.. Everyone here assumes that the charging stations need to be placed out before the network of quads can start doing it's thing.

But, if you had some special mapping drones, lighter and longer reach, with terrain mapping fly out first, then make the charging stations modular..

The network could create a map of the area and build itself until it reached the target. And increasing network capacity would consist of adding more chargers and quads at the entry point,and the netwo